Daydream Believer

I was talking to a young person today, just out of school, and in what I know is becoming a recurring theme felt even older than the use of the expression "young person" seems to indicate.

And somehow, hours after our conversation, which was about her plans for the immediate future--that first big plunge--I was walking from the living room into the kitchen and it was eighteen years ago, and I was twenty-one, in Amsterdam, at a little round table in the sunny window of a cafe with my friend Dana, with whom I was traveling that summer: Eurail pass, backpacks, the whole shebang.

We had paper in front of us, or a journal opened up to a blank page--these were the days of journals with sketches and photographs, menus and meaningful receipts--and we were designing our future bookstore. It was going to have a cafe in it, of course, but a much better cafe than the one we were sitting in, with homemade pastries and excellent coffee, which I at the time did not drink. Coffee in general, that is: neither good nor bad. But I was still young enough to think it was glamorous, and vaguely literary, and not just what you needed to get you to noon.

At that point, although Dana had certainly worked more than I had in every capacity, neither one of us had worked in a real bookstore, or a cafe, and although we both loved to read and write more than anything--it was one of the many underpinnings of our friendship--I can't really remember if we were serious about this idea, this bookstore/cafe, or if we knew at the time it was just wheels spinning, idle, pleasant daydreaming in a sunny, foreign, yet strangely universal cafe.

I guess what I am wondering is if I was naive then, or am jaded now. I'd like to be able to approach my work, however, with that combination of starry-eyed limitless planning and determination (We will really do this, someday. We will.). I'd like to feel young enough that the bookstore/cafe could seem like a viable retirement option way on down the road, and old enough to know what I want in the moment and to be able to work for it.

Whose Leathery Hands are These Attached to My Arms?

So it might be partly that I got a bit of a tan on vacation and keep contrasting the haggard, peeling face I see in the mirror with the unlined golden face I remember from the end of the summer before I started tenth grade, but I am feeling my age these days. I had a conversation tonight with a friend about the pros and cons of dying her greying hair. Yesterday I had a conversation with a different friend about how we should be using eye cream. Next thing you know I'm going to be wearing faded tapered jeans up past my rib cage and trading in my red boots for those shoes with comfort soles.

It's not that I'm vain. To be honest, I could use a little more vanity. I have completely surrendered to the idea that I will pretty much always be wearing something that is covered in dog hair. I gave Lily my hair brush for some sort of a veterinarian game. She broke off my one lipstick that was not alive in the '80s, and I haven't replaced it. I'm not sure if people are still doing yoga, but I've been telling myself I need to get back to it for almost five years. And on and on.

And I know I just wrote about how I'm not terrified of growing older anymore, and honest: I'm not. It's more like I'm wistful about my old self, the self who planned outfits for special occasions and highlighted her hair and knew what exercise trends were in vogue, even if she still couldn't muster up the enthusiasm to partake. I'm wistful a lot these days, and a number of people have reassured me that the wistfulness I am feeling for my former self is only a temporary state, that when Annika is, say, two, my former self will start to creep back in. She might even want to do yoga. Or brush her hair, anyway.

So in honor of my former self, and in deference to the inevitable passing of time, I think I'd like to turn my wistfulness on its head for a change and think about some things I DON'T miss about being young. (I know, I'm not old, exactly, but please. The expression "pushing forty" was invented for a reason.)

1) I don't miss homework. Working with high school students make me think all the time about how I used to wait and wait until it was so late my eyes burned and then, and only then, would I reluctantly attempt to find my biology textbook, determine what the assignment actually was, and lie on my bed, on my back, holding the book above my head while words like "mitochondria" swam across my line of vision until I fell asleep. Always. The night before the Big Test. And don't even get me started on the calculators with the sine and cosine and the other one. I don't miss those.

Interlude: I forgot about something else I was going to say about getting older that is unattractive, and that I'd like to curb immediately. This past seven months (yes, that does correlate with birth of second child, Nicole) I have developed a sort of Rhoda Morgenstern public persona with acquaintances made manifest when asked, for example, "Hey, Amy. How are you?" Instead of smiling and saying "Fine, thanks," these days I tend toward a dramatic eye roll, exaggerated shrug and a line like, "Jim, don't get me started," or "Pat, Tell me it gets easier." It's so annoying I can't even tell you. If you've witnessed me doing this, the world-weary, put-upon schtick that makes me sound like the granddaughter of one of the Zabar's lox slicers, I'm sorry. I'm stopping. I promise.

2) I don't miss spending so much time with people I don't like. I just thought of this one right now, but it's really true. In school, you are in close quarters, day in and day out, with some really loathsome individuals. They sit next to you in class, play on your soccer team, have their cubby next to yours, and bring you down a little with every encounter. In grown-up life you can surround yourself with people you love. The annoying ones still exist, of course, but you rarely have to be lab partners with them.

3) I don't miss caring so intensely about what I looked like. There was a lengthy period when I used either hot rollers or a curling iron on my hair. Every day. Enough said.

I think I'll stop now. I'm a little too tired to think of serious things I don't miss, although I know there are some. I think the point is that being young wasn't all it was cracked up to be either. There's a rawness, an open-wound quality to the caring so much of adolescence that I can just barely recall--enough so that I know I don't want to revisit it.

Now, even though I am unhappy with, if not embarrassed by what I have written here, I am wise enough to know now that tomorrow is another day. For a brief period in 1988 I wasn't sure the sun would rise again if the Laura Ashley dress I wanted to wear to the formal was not available in my size at the Chestnut Hill Mall.

Goodnight. I'm going to bed. I definitely need my beauty sleep.